Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

AP economic advice: Don't panic, last month was worse than it looked!

By

James Taranto

Updated July 1, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

One minuscule compensation for an awful economy is that, with a Democrat in the White House, it makes for some rather amusing journalism as putatively objective reporters try to put the best face on bad news. This Associated Press headline, previewing tomorrow's unemployment numbers, is a classic of the genre: "Layoffs of Census Workers Will Distort Jobs Data."

"The census began hiring more workers last year," the AP notes. "It added about 500,000 this spring." The census is wrapping up, leaving many of those workers back on the unemployment rolls. Take the headline literally, and the AP is promising that things will get back to normal in the spring of 2020, when the government hires hundreds of thousands of temps for the next census. Until then, the employment stats will look worse than they actually are.

It's all a matter of perspective, though. Who's to say that the 3 months out of 120 when the census is going on is "normal" and other 117 months are "distorted"? You could even make a case that the hiring of census workers distorted the job numbers, making them look better than they actually are.

The AP story begins as follows:

For the first time in six months, the federal unemployment report to be released Friday will likely show a net loss of jobs.

But hold off on the panic button.

It's true that employers are expected to have cut more than 100,000 jobs in June. But that figure, if accurate, will be deceptive. It will reflect the end of up to 250,000 temporary census jobs.

Don't panic, things haven't really gotten worse. They were actually just as awful last month! The dispatch continues:

Analysts predict private businesses added 112,000 jobs in June, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. That would be a healthy rebound from May's 41,000 gain. But it's far from enough to signal a roaring recovery or rapidly reduce the unemployment rate, now at 9.7 percent. It would take a net gain of around 200,000 jobs a month to quickly reduce that rate.

The story closes with a quote from Credit Suisse economist Jay Feldman: "Slow growth may not be satisfying, but it is emphatically not--and emphatically better than--a new recession." Amen to that, but isn't this what they used to call a "jobless recovery" back when we had Republican presidents?

As blogger Jim Hoft notes, with video, President Obama is a glass-is-half-full kind of guy too. "Unemployment is still at 9.6. Yes, but it's not 12 or 13--or 15."

Or, we might add, 25 or 50 or 80--or 100. And if that doesn't cheer you up, this surely will: It is logically impossible for unemployment to rise above 100%.

Wait, it gets even better. At this time in 1930, a lot of people were unemployed too, including laid-off temporary census workers. Almost none of those people remain unemployed today. To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, in the long run we are all off the unemployment rolls.

The Stimulus Is Working! "Thousands in Welfare Cash Tapped at California Strip Clubs"--headline, Los Angeles Times website, June 30

Presidents of Vice Police in Portland, Ore., are reopening their investigation into allegations that Al Gore, the U.S. vice president turned Grammy-winning pseudoscience huckster, sexually assaulted a massage therapist in 2006 while visiting the City of Roses. Earlier this week, the Washington Examiner's Byron York detailed the allegations made by the woman, who has not been named in the press:

Gore also requested work on his abdomen. When that began, "He became somewhat vocal with muffled moans, etc.," the masseuse recounted. Gore then "demand[ed] that I go lower." When she remained focused on a "safe, nonsexual" area, Gore grew "angry, becoming verbally sharp and loud."

The masseuse asked Gore what he wanted. "He grabbed my right hand, shoved it down under the sheet to his pubic hair area, my fingers brushing against his penis," she recalled, "and said to me, 'There!' in a very sharp, loud, angry-sounding tone." When she pulled back, Gore "angrily raged" and "bellowed" at her.

Then, abruptly, the former vice president changed tone. It was "as though he had very suddenly switched personalities," she recalled, "and began in a pleading tone, pleading for release of his second chakra there."

The Associated Press reports that Gore "welcomes" the reopening of the investigation. A spokeswoman says "that Gore 'unequivocally and emphatically' denied making unwanted sexual advances. She added that 'further investigation into this matter will only benefit Mr. Gore.' "

The AP adds:

After the alleged incident, the woman said she was dissuaded from contacting the police by liberal friends of hers, whom she refers to as "The Birkenstock Tribe," and of which she counts herself a member.

"It's like being the ultimate traitor," the woman said.

The Birkenstock Tribe evidently has rather backward ideas about the sexes. If the circumstances alleged here were to arise in a more enlightened, Western culture, the man who abused the woman, not the victim, would be regarded as a traitor to the cause.

The New Republic reports on another would-be vice president recently estranged from his wife: "John Edwards parties on." According to TNR, the former North Carolina senator walked into a bar, and the bartender said, "Why the long face?" Oh wait, that was John Kerry*. Here's what happened with Edwards:

Edwards was disappointed to learn the bar was closed for a private event. A group of Duke public policy grad students had reserved the space to celebrate the end of the semester at a party they call "Prom." Inside, a DJ mixed dance music, while a scrum of twentysomethings jostled for drinks. . . .

Edwards stayed for two hours, leaving around midnight. He drank white wine and light beer, according to multiple attendees. After a while, Edwards made his way to the dance floor. "He was kind of uncomfortably dancing," Jentgen says. "He was just happy to be with people who weren't going to judge him." Edwards cut loose, dancing to everything from salsa to Wreckx-n-Effect's 1992 rap hit "Rump Shaker."

One of the strangest lead sentences I have ever encountered appeared in Politico last week. It read: "John Kerry has been the most aggressive advocate of climate change legislation in the Senate this year--so aggressive that it's rubbed some of his colleagues the wrong way." . . .

Once criticized for being too aloof and patrician, Kerry is now being assailed for daring to have passion for the cause of reducing the amount of carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere. . . . Kerry's attitude is not the problem. It's part of the solution.

We'd say anyone who thinks that John Kerry's passion is the answer is asking the wrong question. Then again, in some respects Kerry's passions don't look quite as bad when measured against the competition.

* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.

Diminishing Thurgood Marshall When Elena Kagan leaves her current job for her next one, she will become the fifth former solicitor general to sit on the Supreme Court. She served as a clerk for the last one, Thurgood Marshall, a very liberal justice whose tenure on the court ran from 1967 through 1993. During her confirmation hearings, some Republicans questioned the advice Kagan gave to Marshall, which leads Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson to hint (while disavowing the view) that their motives were racial:

Jon Kyl of Arizona--a state that refused to acknowledge Martin Luther King Day until protests threatened its economy--disapproved of the fact that Kagan had praised Marshall's vision of the courts as the organ to "protect the people who went unprotected."

This is an odd tack to take and assumes only the hard-core base is tuning in. The rest of the country seems pretty happy with its progress on civil rights and not in the mood to debate a pre-Marshall world of Jim Crow laws, segregated schools and whites-only drinking fountains. . . .

Republicans are not a racist party. By revisiting and revising Marshall's legacy, however, they flirt with playing one on TV.

This is a cheap shot. The Associated Press's account of the Kyl-Kagan exchange makes clear that Kyl referred respectfully to Marshall:

"Justice Marshall is a historic figure in many respects," Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said Monday as Kagan's confirmation hearings opened, referring to the lawyer who won a landmark Supreme Court case outlawing school segregation, then went on to become the nation's first black justice.

"And it is not surprising that as one of his clerks she held him in the highest regard," Kyl continued. "Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy, however, is not what I would consider to be mainstream."

Furthermore, Carlson's suggestion that Republicans were harkening back to "a pre-Marshall world of Jim Crow laws, segregated schools and whites-only drinking fountains" is either dishonest or historically ignorant. Marshall joined the court three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Kyl and his colleagues were criticizing Marshall's record as a justice--which, whatever one may think of it, cannot be credited for things that happened before he joined the high court.

Carlson seems to be mixing up Marshall's service on the court with his career before he went to work for the government. As general counsel for the NAACP between 1940 and 1961, Marshall was a great litigator of important cases. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court--the pre-Marshall Supreme Court--and won 29 of them, including Brown.

Few people deny that Marshall was a great lawyer, but that is different from being a great Supreme Court justice--and even a great justice's judicial philosophy is open to question. To suggest that one should not question Marshall's judicial philosophy because he was a civil rights hero is illogical. Kyl takes Marshall's ideas about jurisprudence seriously enough to challenge them. Carlson diminishes Marshall by reducing him to a political symbol.

'Scary New GOP Poll,' Still Undefended Yesterday's item about Markos Moulitsas's poll suggesting that Republicans are crazy prompted a response from John Avlon, whose book "Wingnuts" inspired a similar poll back in March, which we criticized at the time. "So far as we know," we wrote yesterday, "Avlon never mentioned the poll again, nor did he attempt to rebut our critique of it--a silence that speaks volumes."

Here is Avlon's response:

I noticed you couldn't help but try to associate me with the unfolding Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll scandal, again in oddly personal terms. I did, in fact, respond to your initial post in a Daily Beast column, and Harris [the company that conducted the poll] forthrightly responded to criticisms of the poll in a post from their chairman.

This time around, you inaccurately imply that the Harris poll informed my book, when the book inspired the poll. In any case, while the Harris poll has earned an excellent reputation over 50-odd years of existence, the poll was not mine--as you keep insisting--and I cannot take credit or blame for either its methodology or results. I don't know if you actually took the time to read my book, rather than the poll, but your personal partisan and/or ideological discomfort with the dynamics it describes seem to be driving your compulsion to now associate it with Kos, whom--incidentally--I also criticize in the book, when I talk about how Bush Derangement Syndrome on the left predated Obama Derangement Syndrome on the right.

Finally, it appears that you misunderstood my decision not to personally reply to your column as somehow a sign of agreement with you--big mistake. It was instead an attempt to rise above the personal attacks that characterize the ugliest in politics, media and journalism today.

Shorter Avlon: Stop with the personal attacks, you wingnut!

Longer Taranto: The Daily Beast column to which Avlon links had escaped our notice, and we are happy to acknowledge it now. It does not, however, respond in any way to our critique of the poll; instead, it is a defense of a Nazi analogy Avlon had employed, and for which we criticized him in the same column.

The post by Harris's Humphrey Taylor also is not responsive to our criticisms of the poll. It went up at 5:20 p.m. March 25, just over an hour after we published our column. It is framed as a Q&A, but the questions seem to have been written by Taylor himself. To the extent that the post covers some--by no means all--of the substance of our criticisms, the answers strike us as weak and in some cases evasive.

A clarification is in order regarding the provenance of the poll. Avlon told us by email in March that he did not commission it. When we asked what involvement, if any, he had in the poll's design, he wrote:

They asked me to review the questions' phrasing so that it corresponded with the research I'd done for Wingnuts (which is what inspired the poll in the first place).

Avlon also wrote a Daily Beast piece titled "Scary New GOP Poll," in which he described the survey as "the latest and most detailed evidence of the extent to which Wingnuts are hijacking our politics" and opined that "it should be a wakeup call to all Americans."

In yesterday's column, we made one reference to "his poll," meaning Avlon's. Let the record show that although Avlon vetted the questions, wrote about the results with enthusiasm and without skepticism, and described them as validating the thesis of his book, he did not conduct or commission the poll.

Sketch Comedy Yahoo! News notes that Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.) was so bored during the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings that he drew a sketch of Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions:

While Franken is best known as a former comedian, he's also a pretty decent artist. Case in point: He can sketch a detailed map of the United States from memory, a feat he performed on video last year for Minnesota Public Radio.

This could almost have gone under "News of the Tautological." A video of Al Franken is a video made for radio!

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